Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item "Barbarous Berlin": Narratives of Queerness, Space, Survival, and Memory in a Liminal City(2018) Joyner, Raleigh; Baer, Hester; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The intent of my work is to explore the relationships between history, space, community, and movement in and through the city of Berlin throughout the last century. I trace common threads of liminality, memory, survival, and the relationships between the urban space and the individual over a 100-year period. The three periods that I particularly focus on are the Weimar era (1919-1933), the division of Germany and Berlin (1961-1989), and the reestablishment of Germany as a united country (1990-present).Item The Berlin Radio War: Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin and the Shaping of Political Culture in Divided Germany 1945-1961(2008-11-18) Schlosser, Nicholas; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how German radio journalists shaped political culture in the two postwar Germanys. Specifically, it examines the development of broadcast news reporting in Berlin during the first sixteen years of the Cold War, focusing on the reporters attached to the American sponsored station RIAS Berlin and the radio stations of the German Democratic Republic. During this period, radio stations on both sides of the Iron Curtain waged a media war in which they fought to define the major events of the early Cold War. The tension between objectivity and partisanship in both East and West Berlin came to define this radio war. Radio stations constantly negotiated this tension in an attempt to encourage listeners to adopt a specific political worldview and forge a bond between broadcaster and listener. Whereas East German broadcasters ultimately eschewed objectivity in favor of partisan news reporting defined by Marxist-Leninist ideology, RIAS attempted to combine factual reporting with concerted efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the German Democratic Republic. The study contributes to a number of fields of study. First, I contribute to scholarship that has examined the nature, development, and influence of political culture. Related to this, the study considers how political ideas were received and understood by listeners. This work also adds to a growing field of scholarship that goes beyond examining the institutional histories of Germany's broadcasters and analyzes how German broadcasters influenced society itself. Related to this, the dissertation adds to the historiography on how the United States used media outlets as a means of fighting the Cold War. The dissertation is based on archival research done in Germany and the United States. It draws on files from the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Babelsberg, the Bundesarchv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Landesarchiv in Berlin, the archive of the former East German Ministry for State Security in Berlin, and the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD.Item The Wrapped Reichstag and Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe: Some Difficulties with Contemporary Monuments in Post-Reunification Berlin(2008-05-05) Rook-Koepsel, Megan; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The proliferation of memory-sites following the reunification of Germany in 1990 was a testament to the great need of that nation for contextualizing and comprehending its recent traumatic histories. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Reichstag Project for Berlin, and Peter Eisenman's Memorial for the Murdered Jew of Europe are two monuments whose visual forms and conceptual narratives offer answers to the question of how to represent, complicate, and perpetuate memory through monument forms. Yet an analysis of the public reception and comprehension of these two works and the dialogues constructed around their realizations shows that in many ways each of these monuments falls short of its conceptual goals. In this thesis I will question whether an effective and appropriate contemporary monument to Germany's traumatic past is even possible, suggesting that often those elements that make up a successful monument are also the ones that provide for its failings.Item "'You Can't Get a Man With a Gun' and Other Life Lessons: Biography and Musical Theatre(2008-05-05) Joyce, Valerie Michelle; Nathans, Heather S.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation compares the versions of Annie Oakley's persona that have been presented in American popular culture from 1885 to 1999 and analyzes the startling similarity to the state of womanhood in America across the same period. It also examines musical theatre's ideological potential, gender problems that emerge at particular historical moments, and the reciprocal relationship between audience and cultural context. Annie Get Your Gun and its revivals function as a case study that reveals the complicity of musical theatre in advancing certain agendas. Because the creators and producers molded the biography of Annie Oakley for different ideological purposes that suited different audiences, the various versions are particularly useful for comparative analysis and they offer insights into the way the present shapes and reshapes the past. This investigation aims to identify what each production teaches us about American cultural life and to reveal and describe the ideological operations of musical theatre in order to establish its significance in the larger landscape of American popular culture. In its many reincarnations, Annie Get Your Gun's ideological agendas primarily address American female spectators, millions of whom have watched it, largely uncritically. It is my contention that over the course of the late-nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, several artists, from Oakley and Buffalo Bill, to Irving Berlin and Dorothy Fields, to Graciella Danielle and Peter Stone, have used the life story of Annie Oakley in order to convey specific ideological content and to reflect the moral views and behavior of women in the audience. In 1946, the musical collaborators took Oakley's story and crafted a message that would resonate with post-World War II female spectators. Through this investigation, I have identified changes that have been made to Oakley's biography and to the original Annie Get Your Gun script and read them in light of their cultural moment in order to offer possible reasons why these changes appealed to particular audiences; essentially, why spectators forgive and even applaud the factual omissions and changes that occur. A non-redacted version of this dissertation with the images is available in the University of Maryland library.